I grew up in Chicago listening to ‘CFL so this book is a must read. Every survey is included and the bios on the jocks is great. My only dissapointment is after reading just a few pages, it is obvious that no one did a proofread before publishing. There are many misspelled words and the small print department on all the surveys omits the last few words (owned and operated by the Chicago Federation of Labor).

The problem with self-publishing is there’s no editor to suggest improvements. In this case, this book is crying out for at least one index. You cannot look up a record by artist or by song title, because all you have are week-by-week playlists. That means it’s interesting if you want a list of songs that WCFL was playing on your birthday or anniversary, or the week you graduated from high school. If you want to know which songs by the Beach Boys or by Petula Clark or by Sam & Dave made it onto ‘CFL’s airwaves, good luck.

The book is more than 800 pages long, but there’s a lot of wasted white space on each page. With better layout it could have been indexed without adding any pages. The appearance of each page is so bleak it makes a telephone directory look exciting by comparison.

In addition, these are not scanned, photographed, or photocopied surveys, either. The text has been either typed or put into a word processor, so all photos and graphics are missing.

The author has included a list of WCFL disc jockeys, with varying amounts of biographical information, generally limited to when that person was on WCFL. There is at least one glaring omission, however: where is Jim Runyon? It was on his morning drivetime show that Chickenman was created, along with Amazon Ace. Then there was his traffic reporter (later his wife) Trooper 36-24-36. She also did all the female voices on Chickenman.

There’s a mostly alphabetical list of songs allegedly played by other Chicago stations but not by ‘CFL. Two Paul McCartney songs are tacked on at the end of the list, seemingly as an afterthought. This would suggest the list was not created in a database program, where re-alphabetizing the list would be quick and easy.

Unless you’re in need of the week-by-week lists, Ron Smith’s book based on the same information would be much more useful, as it’s alphabetical by artist with a song title index. It’s also available from amazon, and it’s half the price of this one.

I’ve been a reference librarian for 36 years and a music junkie longer than that. I was excited to discover this book and quite disappointed when I received it.